[slime-devel] New wire format

[Hugo Duncan]

On Sun, 06 Nov 2011 12:13:07 -0500, Helmut Eller <heller at common-lisp.net>  
wrote:

> Counting characters was problematic, especially with Lisps that use
> UTF16 internally (Allegro, CMUCL, JVM based Lisps).  Emacs counts the
> length of strings in Unicode code points, while in UTF16 a single code
> point may occupy either 1 or 2 indexes (code units) and so CL:LENGTH may
> return something different as Emacs expected.  For the same reason we
> can't use READ-SEQUENCE to read a specified number of code points.
>
> The new format looks so:
>
>   | byte0 | 3 bytes length |
>   |    ... payload ...     |
>
> The 3 bytes length header specify the length of the payload in bytes.

Is there a reason to start using a binary encoding of the message length?   
This makes the messages less easy to inspect, and less easy to write  
integration tests for.

> The playload is an s-exp encoded as UTF8 text.

Normalising on utf-8 and counting bytes sounds like it would solve the  
original issue without changing to a binary encoding of the message length.


-- 
Hugo Duncan